XenMobile 8.6 maintenance release deep dive

XenMobile 8.6 maintenance release is focused on the client components, these will be available on January 6, 2014. These components include Worx Home, WorxMail, WorxWeb, and the MDX Toolkit. Let’s walk through the items that are addressed:

WorxWeb, WorxMail, and Worx Home bug fixes and stability enhancements

A number of customer and internally QA reported bugs and stability issues were prioritized for this release. This included things like:

Wifi policies configuration on Android 4.3

Multiple logon prompts

WorxWeb on Android issues with connecting to internal home page

WorxMail not working with Android 4.3

WorxMail Syncing issue

WorxMail access denied error

WorxMail issue with airplane mode

A number of 3rd party application issues with the MDX Toolkit

Battery life optimization improvements for iOS7

Improvement of the battery life for WorxMail is a continual process. Good strides were made in this area for this release. The following tests were conducted to compare the Native mail client, the existing 8.6 release, and the new 8.6 maintenance release. The criteria includes actively running 9 hours on LTE and 15 hours on wi-fi recording the drain on this device for 24 hours. The reduction in battery usage is 21% improvement in battery usage.

Support for Android 4.4 (KitKat)

Android 4.4 also know as KitKat shipped the last days of October. The XenMobile 8.6 release timetable was not able to absorb this new operating system. This 8.6 maintenance release now supports the Android 4.4 operating system. This includes the MDM and MDX components of XenMobile. To fully support Android 4.4, you much wrap your Android applications with the 8.6 maintenance release of the MDX Toolkit. You can find this new toolkit on January 6th, 2014 here.

Jailbreak fixes for iOS and Android

XenMobile 8.6 provided improvements in detection of a Jailbroken/rooted device. These new methods of detection decreased the amount of false positive reports. The criteria to decide whether a device is jailbroken/rooted was modified to insure greater accuracy reporting a positive device.

ShareFile SSO

The integration between ShareFile and the XenMobile clients were modified to pass the credentials between the Worx Home client and ShareFile. There were several intermittent issues that were addressed.

Voicemail support in WorxMail (.wav and .mp3)

Support of voicemail attachments to iOS WorxMail is an improved capability. Wav is the most common format used by service providers for converting voicemail into email attachments. There are however a few codec formats supported. These include: ADPCM, GSM, CELP, SBC, TrueSpeech and MPEG-4. With that being said, the WAV codec that the WorxMail 1.3.3 supports is PCM only, see the chart below.

All the components will be available to the public on January 6, 2014. If you have any questions about access or early testing, please contact the Citrix Customer Support for XenMobile.

Update January 6, 2014 @ 9am PST – Happy New Year. The components for this maintenance release are now available on the different App Stores as well as Citrix.com.

Updated January 7, 2014 @ 4:30pm PST –

I am happy to announce that the Worx Home for Samsung was released into the Google Play earlier today. This version is used for the SAFE features on older Samsung devices. This client requires that Samsung sign the distribution, which unfortunately takes a bit more time to achieve. It will take approximately 24 hours to replicate around the world.

The Worx Home for Samsung has one difference to the Worx Home general client, it does not support the WorxWeb client in MDM ONLY mode. A few changes were made to the Worx Home client to accommodate this use case, this will be rectified in the next release of the clients. The other change to the Samsung client is that we have changed the METADATA to allow installation of 4.2 and older OS/devices. The newer licenses are usable on the generic Worx Home client.